Yes. Exactly. Yes.

Oh my god, this was so good to read.

When I was eleven my mother gave me a book called "Let's Talk About Sex", presumably so that we never had to actually talk about sex. I tried a few times to discuss aspects of it with her, but she shamed me into silence ("you'll make a real fool of yourself if you talk about that with other people").

When I was twenty-four I came out to my mother, anxious almost to the point of tears, and her response was: "Okay. Well, that's fine. What are you making such a fuss about?"

I tried to explain that, actually, this was quite a big deal for me. She looked confused, and also slightly annoyed, which is how she feels about people making a fuss about things.

I said that it was very hard to admit it to myself and also it was hard to tell people. She said, "well, why do you need to tell people at all?"

I said that, FOR EXAMPLE, since I was dating a woman this might come up in conversation. She said, "Why? I have plenty of conversations where I don't talk about your father at all."

My parents have since met my girlfriend several times and been warm and welcoming and behaved like normal humans, but the feeling of needing a battering ram to smash down the walls of silence is one that completely resonates with me. Thank you SO SO MUCH. It's strangely comforting to know that other people have gone through similar confusing experiences.

Dirtbag Mary Magdalene.

So the week that this was published coincided with a bunch of deadlines and I missed it somehow (?!), and I only realised yesterday that it had gone up way back in December. Thanks so much everyone who liked it & said so! Nicest comment thread ever <3

Painful and brilliant.

I was an altar girl and my dad is an Anglican (Episcopalian) minister. At some point after I began to realise I was gay, my faith trickled out of me as though God and lesbianism couldn't both exist inside a person at once. This piece made my heart hurt in a familiar way, but I was glad I shared this hurt with someone, and that you could articulate it so sharply.

You are correct: I did not have anything better to do. Now I have watched every episode. Now I can die happily.

Oh, man. Thank you for writing this.

"But, Wait! you say. Do not many books state that it is impossible to isometrically embed the hyperbolic plane as a closed subset of the Euclidean 3-space?"

I DIE

Wow, I have absolutely no idea - but if it is anything at all it is PRETTY LIKELY that it was a movie made from an Agatha Christie novel. I have absorbed Agatha Christie's entire oeuvre into my body and it is leaving one phrase at a time. Agatha Christie can be detected in the bloodstream for many years, even longer than pot.